Castro The Book Burner - UPDATED

Cubans-Americans in Miami have been embroiled in a fight with the school board of Miami-Dade to remove a book called “Vamos a Cuba”. This book is considered by those who have read it to be a pack of lies and propaganda about life in Cuba under Castro.

Cubans living in South Florida were understandably offended that their children were being exposed to the lies that they left their country so their children wouldn’t be exposed to. To a Cuban American exile praising Castro’s Cuba has the same visceral effect that praising Hitler’s Germany would have to a Jew or Praising South African apartheid would have to a South African black or praising the Confederacy to an American black. It is not about a differing “point of view” or a subjective interpretation of reality. It is about the facts of an evil and immoral system.

Cubans in Miami have been accused of being book banners and censors. Why? Because we don’t want our children to be told that everything’s fine in a country were they actually do ban books? Because we don’t want children to be indoctrinated with propaganda? Call us crazy.

Today the Sun Sentinel has the truth about Cuba, books and libraries and highlights why Cubans find books that lie to children offensive.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Spurred by events in South Florida, a national group is urging students to read books that have been burned in Cuba.

The organization, FREADOM, launched the project last month to bring attention to documents and books, such as the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and George Orwell's Animal Farm, that the Cuban government has banned and set afire. The project is a takeoff on campaigns encouraging people to read banned books.

"Banning a book is the intent to kill," said Walter Skold, co-chairman of FREADOM, a group of librarians, authors and human rights activists. "Burning it is the crime of murder."

The project came about in part from a controversy in Miami-Dade public schools over the children's book Vamos a Cuba. The Miami-Dade School Board pulled the book last year after Cuban exiles complained it was an inaccurate portrayal of life on the communist island. Among critics of the book's removal were Cuban librarians.

Skold, a middle school teacher from Maine, said many media outlets reported the criticism without disclosing that some books are prohibited in Cuba.

"This is all propaganda. They don't mention once that they're burning books in their country," he said, referring to the Cuban librarians.

As proof, Skold points to official Cuban sentencing documents from the government's March 2003 crackdown on dissidents in which 75 people were arrested.

The documents, obtained by Florida State University's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights in Tallahassee, were posted on the Web site, www.ruleoflawandcuba.fsu.edu. In them, the Cuban government mentions confiscated pamphlets, magazines and books they deemed counterrevolutionary. They ordered the works destroyed, some by "incineration."

Continuing a welcomed new trend in the Free –Press, a dissident and independent Cuban librarian is quoted in the article.

Some of the dissidents rounded up in 2003 were independent librarians who established lending libraries in their homes, offering banned books to neighbors. Today, there are 135 such libraries, said Gisela Delgado, head of the independent library movement in Cuba.

Delgado said government officials routinely confiscate books mailed to her. They have also seized books from her 2,500-book library, most recently in 2003, she said.

Delgado said she hopes the burned-book campaign will give people in the United States an appreciation of the freedom their counterparts in Cuba do not have.

"These (independent libraries) are the only chance children, young people, and even older people have to have all of this literature in their hands," Delgado said from her home in Havana.

Finally Skold Says:

"We would like it to be part of the record that whatever else [Castro]
was, he was a book burner,"

I urge to read the whole article here

Babalu has more in this post from 1/23/06. Thanks, Val.